Ideas That Plague Us: Crime and Punishment as a Pandemic Narrative

Abstract

This paper argues that the motif of illness runs through all of Crime and Punishment and accompanies key developments and themes to such an extent that the novel merits a reading as a plague, or pandemic, narrative. The paper examines imagery of illness and infection in Dostoevsky’s novel and analyzes the way this imagery is used to underscore the danger and the infectiousness of the ideas that Dostoevsky is trying to debunk. This analysis of Crime and Punishment shows that Dostoevsky brilliantly mixes metaphors of biological and ideological infection, diagnosing ailments that still plague us to this day.